New information of the delayed delivery of the 3/2015 issue

Dear Customers in Denmark, Norway Spain, France, Belgium and Austria,

We are truly sorry for any inconvenience caused in the delayed delivery of the 3/2015 issue, but unfortunately there isn't much we can do right now. We just have to be patient and wait.  

We plan our schedules with care and the magazine should be delivered to subscribers before bookshops and retailers. With the 3/2015 issue a problem occurred in the delivery process. Normally the magazine should have been delivered to readers before or just after Easter, and in all cases before the 9th of April. In Germany, Finland and some other countries everything went as planned but a few countries have suffered delays.

Deliveries to subscribers and to retailers are dealt with differently. We send whole pallets of magazines directly to international companies specialized in retailing magazines (who then deliver the magazines themselves to bookshops, kiosks and supermarkets). Subscribers' copies are sorted first according to country, town and postal address, to make it easy for local postal services to deliver them. The pallets which included the foreign subscribers' copies were sent from our print house in Joensuu to Helsinki to be sorted and then transported to local postal services in Belgium, Austria, Denmark, France, Spain and Norway plus a few other countries.

As far as we were concerned everything was on schedule but after Easter many customers wrote asking for their magazines. At first we thought the delay was caused by the Easter holidays and a strike announced in Finnish harbors, but in the end it seems to have been due to human error. On investigation we discovered that whole pallets of magazines were missing. These unsorted pallets were all on their way to France. We managed to stop them in Germany and they were returned to Finland. The magazines were then sorted and sent on to subscribers around the 14th of April with an estimated delivery time of 4-10 days depending on their final destination. 

 Like many other companies, we depend on logistic services provided by local postal services in Europe and various international delivery companies such as Swiss Post, DHL and UPS. Their logistic systems are huge and if a few pallets get loaded on to the wrong truck, it can take a while before anyone notices there is problem. Thanks to our readers emails we realized that something had gone wrong and fortunately we found our pallets and the magazines are now all on their way to our subscribers (or have been delivered over the last week).

 Our pattern magazine is published in eight languages and sold worldwide. Due to the huge distances involved it is impossible to ensure that all our subscribers receive their magazine on the very same day. We hope that our readers understand that although deliveries may take place during quite a wide window of time, we are doing our very best to ensure that the wait is a short as possible for everyone.

We promise to do all we can to ensure that future deliveries go smoothly. We’d love to employ Father Christmas and his reindeer to deliver all the magazines in one single night or even buy our own fleet of delivery trucks but we feel that we should focus our energy on creating the great clothes and fabulous photos that make OTTOBRE magazine one of the best pattern magazines available…and try to trust the various delivery companies to get the magazine to your door on time. 
We apologize for the delay and we assure you that we are doing our best to make sure all our subscribers receive their copy of the 3/2015 magazine as soon as possible.

Yours faithfully, 

OTTOBRE design team